Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

November 29, 2005

Nick Denton has posted a list of services, tools, and sites that he is calling a startup kit. He lists many of the usual suspects like basecamp and some cool online ad sales and web-based benefits administration services. This is great for all of the web 2.0 service creators. Interesting to see FogBugz on there. It's something I'm having to use and learning to appreciate.

November 28, 2005

On Sunday a group of us went to Triple Eight Palace for some post Thanksgiving dim sum. I brought along my new digital recorder to try to make a small sound tour of the experience. Melissa Clark, a good friend and cookbook writer, has been a fan of chicken feet since she was a little girl and here she talks about how to eat them properly. (photo by niznoz)

Starting December 5th we will all be able to download a weekly podcast show by Ricky Gervais from the Guardian's web site.

But they have decided not to go back to the GCap-owned London station, and will instead make the programme available for download over the internet.

"I want to do a radio show where I can say what I want, when I want for as long as I want and that's free for anybody who can be bothered to listen anywhere in the world," said Gervais.

"We didn't want it to just be the best bits of a radio programme you'd missed so this is a show that is straight-to-Pod-cast. I suppose we're trying to create an exclusive club. We'd prefer this to be a few people's favourite show than a huge samey ineffectual broadcast."

Bill Moyers speaks out about the way the Administration, through Kenneth Tomlinson, went after NOW.

We were biased, all right—in favor of uncovering the news that powerful people wanted to keep hidden: conflicts of interest at the Department of Interior, secret meetings between Vice President Cheney and the oil industry, backdoor shenanigans by lobbyists at the FCC, corruption in Congress, neglect of wounded veterans returning from Iraq, Pentagon cost overruns, the manipulation of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq.

We were way ahead of the news curve on these stories, and the administration turned its hit men loose on us.

Tomlinson actually told The Washington Post that he was irate over one of our documentary reports from a small town in Pennsylvania hard-hit by outsourcing.

If reporting on what's happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington officials is liberalism, I stand convicted.

It is an old canard of right-wing ideologues like Tomlinson to equate tough journalism with liberalism. They hope to distract people from the message by trying to discredit the messenger.

Now threw the fear of God into Tomlinson's crowd because they couldn't dispute the accuracy of our reporting.

And when we weren't reporting the truth behind the news, we were interviewing a wide variety of people: Ralph Reed and Ralph Nader; Cal Thomas and Molly Ivins; Robert Bartley, editor of the Wall Street Journal; Katrina Vandenheuval, editor of The Nation; The Conservative Union's David Keene; Dorothy Rabinowitz (also of the Wall Street Journal); Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity; the Club for Growth's Stephen Moore; historian Howard Zinn; and Indian activist Arundhati Roy. And on and on.

November 22, 2005

Two people, one very technical and the other not so, told me about wayfaring.com yesterday. A map creation and sharing tool. You create a map, people can leave notes, tags, bookmarks of other maps. Built with Ruby on Rails with the google maps hooked in.

November 17, 2005

A colleague just sent me a link to Russell Beattie's excellent post about all of the new Internet 2.0 start-ups and how they fall into several categories: scrape engines, mashed ups (with a good point about the mapping costs Google is currently absorbing), web trapps, social anything, phile sharing, content management saturation, rss holes, firefoxing. I hadn't read his site before. He works at Yahoo focusing on mobile applications and has a great style as their own Scoble.

TimeOutNY has launched a new site. I like it but then again I like grids. Their site still seems to just take their articles and listings and place them online. You need to register or subscribe for access to any of the search results or full articles. Also the whole thing is flash driven. So essentially a better looking holder for their print content and as I poked through my enthusiasm was greatly diminished.

November 16, 2005

Gawker Media blog excerpts to appear on Yahoo news page. Andrew Sullivan's taking his blog in house at Time Inc and having it appear on their home page. TalkingPointsMemo's appearance last week on the Washington Post's op-ed page as a guest columnist, they took in the rss feed. Just shows how quickly the idea of a media brand is shifting. Once impenetrable pages that reflect their editor's "vision" now they are opening up to outsiders. I wonder will people say that they read Andrew Sullivan's blog on Time or will they say I just read in Time..Either case it is about time for this.

Slate has a nice feature on the favorite college books from journalists and others. One of the others is Mark Cuban, whose favorite book unsurprisingly is The FountainHead.

Bought the WSJ on the way in to work today and of course it had a list of top industry blogs that cried out to be read electronically, here is the link.

November 15, 2005

My friend David's mother not only has a blog herself but she has encouraged all 108 of her students to create them. My mother, on the other hand, will annoyingly tell people I made her author's guild site when all I did was fill in the blanks on their cms. But she is afraid of her computer mouse so I guess it is a big deal. I wonder if David's mother sends him e-mail petitions?

November 12, 2005

"The online
retailer of books and just about everything else was awarded three new
patents, covering its purchase circles, search and consumer reviews.
While Amazon.com's patent police would go after Web publishers, not
consumers, the review patent could put the kibosh on the social
networking components of many search services." read article on internet.com.

November 11, 2005

Reporter keeps source name confidential. Prosecutor feels different, ""I think the people have a right to know what inspired this cook to create a sweet glaze that doesn't overwhelm the savory taste of the ham," Hardin said. "Such deliciousness cannot remain hidden any longer."" Read about the unfolding saga.

A really interesting comparison of the search types, services, and overall directions of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, & AOL. This under the guise of guessing what Google will do next. Made me realize how broad all of the offerings are. (via Susan Mernit)

This month's Esquire has a great 2 page spread illustrating the way that the wikipedia community fact-checked, refined, and edited A.J. Jacob's intentionally flawed article about Jimmy Wales. This CNET article describes the process by which the article was edited 374 times in the first 24 hours. It also talks about why the LA Times effort failed. The CNETpage also has Live Plasma's big picture visual relation tool which I had heard about but never seen. That alone is worth following the link.